Sabotaged by Polish orthography
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
There's no need to know the singular for pierogi, because no one has ever eaten just one.
In return, I promise to continue working to stop Polish people from pluralizing potato chips as "chipsy".
I'm not sure if "pierogi" is common enough yet for "pierogies" to become the valid way to pluralize it in English, but as a Russian speaker, "чипсы" sounds perfectly normal to me.
After all, if I were speaking Russian I wouldn't say "компьютерз" - I would say "компьютеры", using the correct pluralization in the language I'm speaking in.
You can try to interest "Rada Języka Polskiego" (Polish Language Council) into this topic. Just because we all know, every Polish speaker will follow their advice diligently :).
In early 90's, after the COCOM embargo on import of computers into former then Eastern Block had been lifted, there were initiatives to translate English-sounding word into something more native to Polish language.
An example of a word that badly needed such translation was 'interface', for which a proposed translation was 'międzymordzie' (literally: a thing between two faces) which sounded hilariously bad in Polish. There was another proposal to name 'computer mouse' as something even better, but I've forgotten the name since.
Fortunately, nobody followed, and 'computer mouse' is simply 'mysz' (mouse). I hear, that French had longer lasting successes with their translations.
Kind of. Generally, ‶old″ words are consistently translated. For instance, we have souris for mouse (which is exactly the direct translation, because it conveys the same idea), ordinateur (which could be translated as ‶sorter/processor″) for computer, informatique (science of the information) for computer science, disquette (small disk) for floppy disk, logiciel for software, and so on.
However, newer ones (i.e. past ~1985) didn't catch so much, mostly because the official translation were awful and/or came years too late. For instance, CD-ROM is supposes to be cédérom, i.e. the straight phonetic transliteration – losing all meaning in the process; tablet is supposed to be ardoise numérique (digital slate) – evokes school, came years too late and was too long in comparison to the colloquial tablette; fouineur (snooper) for hacker (no comment...); cybermonnaie (cyber-money) for cryptocurrency – losing half of the semantic, and so on.
W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.
And:
Stół z powyłamywanymi nogami.
I sure youtube will find you proper pronunciations.
Some called the mouse "gryzon" which means rodent, but that was very early days of computers in Poland - say 1990.
> I promise to continue working to stop
Finns are great at this as well. Some examples:
chips - sipsit
shorts - shortsit
donut, donuts - donitsi, donitsit
ribs - ribsit (as in the food)
wings - wingsit (likewise)
Then there's the recent abomination that seems to be getting popular as there's no established word for a mobile app yet:
app, apps - äpsi, äpsitThat, friend, is hilarious, and so true.
Ain't that the truth! My Polish friend also introduced me to 'pierogi rooski'? Apparently, a Russian take on pierogi, with more meat. Do I have the spelling correct?
> In return, I promise to continue working to stop Polish people from pluralizing potato chips as "chipsy".
As a Jamaican, where banana chips are like a national snack, it was amusing to see "chipsy bananowe" for sale. Fun times; I plan to go back.
If you mean "pierogi ruskie", they don't have any meat in them, just quark with potatoes and onion, though they're often served with bacon. And this dish comes from "Ruś" (now Ukraine), not "Rosja", otherwise it would be called "pierogi rosyjskie". I hear that in Ukraine they call this dish "Polish pierogi".
> As a Jamaican, [...], it was amusing to see "chipsy bananowe" for sale.
I believe "it" was not a Jamaican, however amusing it was.
Blasphemy!
In Poland, 'pierogi ruskie' are ones with cheese and potato. Also delicious!
Confusingly, Russian does have the word "pirogi" (plural; singular "pirog") - but it's a kind of pie, not a dumpling.
Not because there's anything wrong with it, that is.
It's just always puts a smile on my face when I walk past a tipsy nail salon with a sign that means euphemistically, to my British ears, being on the path to getting properly drunk.
Then again, when I'm ordering an espresso in Italy, my results with just "caffé" are also mixed because it turns into the poison scene from The Princess Bride:
- is the guy speaking Italian? - is the guy just asking for a regular coffee because he doesn't speak Italian? - do they maybe call it different in different parts of the country?
I will never solve this mystery, I guess.
Now I know that in real-world usage it would be unlikely to refer to one, but what if there was a need to? Let's say someone made a statue to pierogi, but due to budgetary problems only one of the several pierogi planned was constructed. A tourist asks you how many pierogi make up the statue. How would you respond? Would you use the singular, like "only one pieróg", or would you rework your response so there was no need for the singular, like "sadly only one of the several pierogi was built"? Which seems more natural?
I've been dining off it since.
This is a hilariously colorful analogy. Is it a translation of a Polish analogy, or are you just a very descriptive English speaker?
In Internet forum speak, the asterisk means "I meant to say" or "You meant to say".
In linguistics, the asterisk means "This form is not attested (we don't have examples of people using it)" or "This form would be considered mistaken by speakers".
That means that the forum usage of asterisks is something like "I should have said X" while the linguistics use of asterisks is something like "I shouldn't have said X". :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Linguistics
"In linguistics, an asterisk is placed before a word or phrase to indicate that it is not used, or there are no records of it being in use."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Typography
"Asterisks may denote corrections to misspelling or misstatements in previous electronic messages"
So, like "chipy"? I don't think it's a good idea :)
Making matters worse, there are homophones (ż and rz, u and ó, ch and h) that depend on when the word entered the language.
Like so many things wrong with the country, you can comfortably blame the Catholic Church for this orthographic train wreck.
Regarding homophones, this is not 'when word entered the language' but rather, the change of pronunciation no longer matching the phonetic writing.
The 'ó' vs 'u' is homophone because the sound now is the same. However, historically it wasn't. Additionally, since historically it was different sound, it also had different rules for how it morphed during declension.
Similar situation is with 'ż' and 'rz'. There are even cool words that due to declension we can see where they originated from. For example two declensioned words have same pronunciation: 'każe' and 'karze'. The first comes from root word 'kazać' as in tell people what to do. The second comes from root word 'karać' meaning punish.
I would wager that 'ch' and 'h' is the most recent homophone. Some people still alive were taught to use correct hard 'H' vs soft 'CH' when pronouncing words.
I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù and ÿ are not a thing in standard French.
Polish is uniquely bad not because of the diacritics, but because of the special phonetic behavior of digraphs ('si', 'ci', 'zi', 'rz', 'sz', 'cz', 'ch', 'dż', 'dź', 'dzi').
But this is now approaching discussion that writing doesn't match phonetic. Pronunciation shifts. Words change. Brother Grimms (famous for fables) were linguists studying how consonants use has changed. They talk how 'pater' (like paternity) shifted to 'father'. But Polish has own such shifts. Take a word like 'jabłko', which many people pronounce 'japko' or 'śliwka' that is pronounced as 'ślifka'.
There is even a branch discussing how people using correct pronunciation are HyperCorrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish
(Plus I’m guessing that sound change happened pretty early on, because as far as I know, all Polish consonant clusters obey that rule of voicing & devoicing obstruents.)
For example, "ч" is always the "ch" or "tsh" sound, whether we're talking about Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or Serbian. OTOH, in Polish you use "cz" for it, while in Czech and Serbian it's "č".
It's not an inherent advantage of Cyrillic, of course, it's just that, by virtue of being designed specifically for Slavic languages, it had certain letters designated from the get go, while adopting Latin allowed for a lot more leeway in deciding how to represent sounds, and different languages did it differently.
But speakers of those languages don't consider the diacritics to be a modifier in this case - we treat them as completely separate letters, that just have a disjoint element in their overall shape. I don't see why e.g. c vs č can't be treated in the same exact way as и vs й (and indeed, I wonder if Czech don't already do that?).
Spend a week or two practising a pronunciation guide and that's pretty much well it.
Reading something out loud for the first time? Native level accuracy 95% of the time, easy.
Compared with the absolute crap shoot which is English or - my nightmare - French, reading Polish out loud is an absolute walk in the park.
But reading French out loud? Anybody with a week or two of practice should definitely be able to know how to pronounce well over 95% of what they read, even if they don't know what they're saying.
(It doesn't solve the problem of missing letters and missing diacritics when trying to write your language using English letters only — but Serbs, Ukrainians etc. can't write their language correctly using only Russian letters either.)
ś—sz
ć—cz
ź—rz/ż
dź—dż
Mandarin of all languages has this phonetic distinction, but I don't think any other Slavs kept the full set, on top of the nasals mjd wrote about.
I think these contrasts represent a very underacknowledged difficulty for English speakers learning Mandarin, because we're used to thinking of tones as the only hard thing. I'm still struggling to properly pronounce a friend's name that I think begins with /ʈ͡ʂʰ/. Maybe Polish speakers can deal with this easily!
Retroflex consonants are still awkward, but at least I can produce them reliably. What's really hard for me are uvulars, they feel a bit like choking every time.
They say:
"I pronounced the velar ejective consonant [k'] and all I got was this [t']-shirt."
There was a post on Language Hat or Language Log where a professor recounted meeting a student who had linguistics "as a hobby", which was astonishing to the professor -- and the student explained that this was possible nowadays because of Wikipedia. (To which I could add, for some people because of the conlang community, or because of linguistics blogs!)
Anyway, Wikipedia's coverage of linguistics topics is generally really excellent and detailed (maybe strongest in phonology, perhaps because of a few super-obsessed editors).
the point is I don't think Latin vs Cyrillic in Poland's case was driven by Polish language phonetics per se. I would venture to guess this had more to do with political/religious affiliations etc.
The Cyrillic alphabet as originally developed for Old Church Slavonic lacks several sounds of Polish, namely the velarized /l/ (which has now become a semivowel /w/ except in peripheral dialects), and the palatalized affricates /ź/ and /ć/.
If you are a Russian speaker, you might think that Cyrillic could represent palatalized sounds by use of the soft sign, but that it not what the soft sign was actually used for originally. It was meant to represent the front reduced vowel /ĭ/ before the fall of the yers. So, Russian choose to represent its phonology by extending the Cyrillic alphabet in a way that was originally unintended, while Polish chose to represent its phonology by extending the Latin alphabet. How is either of these choices better than the other?
I'm not a linguist, but looking at the differences between the corresponding alphabet, it feels like Polish one had a stronger German influence. The use of W rather than V stands out in particular (and makes no sense in an alphabet that doesn't use V at all!). But also, Germans love their digraphs and trigraphs.
1. Any suitable choice of orthography will become unsuitable eventually. Pronunciation is not static.
2. There is, and has been, quite a bit of dialectical variation within the Poland and its diaspora. What may be suitable for one group, may not be for another.
I will throw you some pudełka. I am busy with those pudełkami. There is something wrong with those pudełkom. Whats the size of these pudełek?
And its funny: the newest IOs still don't have "ą"
"Laske mi robi." means "to condescend/deign to do something for somebody" (ł) or "to do a blowjob" (l).
http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp is from the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005. It shows several examples of accented capital letters, like LA NACIÓN in the headline of a newspaper, and the phrase "ESTÁ PROHIBIDO FUMAR DENTRO DE LAS DEPENDENCIAS DE LA EMPRESA."
That said, La Nación itself doesn't use accents when capitalized. On the other hand, you can see "EL PAÍS" several times at https://elpais.com/ . On the third hand, the El País in Uruguay doesn't use the accent http://www.elpais.com.uy/ . But it does uses ALCANZÓ in a headline http://a2010.kiosko.net/02/06/uy/uy_elpais.750.jpg .
http://procedimientospolicialesargentina.blogspot.de/2016/04... has an interesting mix with the blog title "DIA DE LA POLICIA DE LA NACION ARGENTINA" and a poster image saying "DIÁ NACIONAL DEL POLICÍA".
On top of that, at least on Windows (I'm not sure about Mac), the caps lock key is not a caps lock, but a shift lock. Which means it doesn't capitalize characters, but does the same as pressing shift+key.
Funnily enough, in other French locales (IIRC at least Belgium), the caps lock key on Windows is a caps lock key.
So "pączki" is pronounced "pon-tch-qui" while "paczki" is "patch-qui".
While I learned to speak a little bit, it was not enough to be functional beyond basic greetings and ordering food. It was always a lot of interesting fun, though.
The main outcome of all this is that for ten years, whenever I see a Toyota Camry, my weird brain thinks "hmm... tsahm-rih..." and I roll my eyes at it.
Is there a standard way to write this when limited to ASCII?
For example, Danish/Norwegian replace æ, ø, å with ae, oe, aa. It seems less likely that something could exist and be reasonably readable for Polish.
Most search engines find "Zazolc" and "Zażółć" equal because of that. This becomes a problem in case of the words like "paczki" (boxes) and "pączki" (donuts), which have their own separate meaning - as explained in the article.
In contrast to most European countries, in Poland we use American keyboard layout with "Polish (programmers) layout" keyboard setting in OS.
You press ALT+A, ALT+E, ALT+L, ALT+S, ALT+C, ALT+Z, ALT+X to write "ą", "ę", "ł", "ś", "ć", "ż", "ź", respectively.
Some words written without Polish characters can become ambiguous without context. For example: word "łaska" - "mercy", written without Polish letter "ł" is "laska" - "stick".
Although, in old good times some people used British pound character in texts to express this letter, since '£' is visually similar to 'Ł' and more often available.
For other characters (ś,ź,ć,ż,ó,ą,ę) nothing like that was widely adopted. Workaround would be possible for 'ż' and 'ó' since they are (almost - see below) phonetically identical with 'rz' and 'u' respectively, but it wasn't popular, since most probably would be perceived as sign of very, very bad orthography.
*Almost, since some people claim they can distinguish these, but it's not popular ability.
When used in (computer) writing this is very readable, but no one would do this with handwriting, I think most common cases nowadays would be SMS messages (especially on dump phones) or some weird displays that are unable to properly render diacritic letters.
Or for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress
In Portuguese, my strongest foreign language, I can think of examples like
a 'the (feminine)' / à 'at the (feminine)'
nó 'knot' / no 'in the'
dá 'gives' / da 'of the'
nós 'we' / nos 'in the (plural)'
sê 'I should be' / se 'oneself' / sé 'see (Catholic)'
pode 'can' / pôde 'could (past)'
avô 'grandfather' / avó 'grandmother'
tem 'he/she has' / têm 'they have'
among many others.
At least a couple of these reflect vowel differences, although some would be homophones in speech. Every language that holds on to diacritics would have pairs like this where the diacritics make a difference to the meaning. So people may really appreciate having writing systems that can reflect these differences in order to avoid confusions that would otherwise occur.
Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th.
This didn't have quite the full benefit that you describe, though, because of compound words like "cathouse", "hothouse", "lighthouse", "outhouse", etc. And of course digraphs can be extra-risky whenever languages accept loanwords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Hist...
* There is no individually-pronounced "n" sound; it is built entirely into the nasalized vowel.
* The /ʂ/ sound is actually a laminal retroflex. This is best described as making a "sh" sound, but with the blade of the tongue.
People form other countries just can't get it right :)
Which lead me to this interpretation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNsFOPYMzE